Hysteria Rises as UN Climate Talks in Durban Heat Up

United Nations “experts” released a preliminary report during the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) climate-change summit in Durban, South Africa, claiming the Earth was still heating up and rapid government action would be needed to stave off global warming. But in the wake of the growing “Climategate 2.0” scandal, analysts said the newest wave of UN scare mongering appeared increasingly desperate and ridiculous.

Earlier this month the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was ridiculed for alarmist warnings of more extreme weather in the coming decades. However, the statements were far more cautious than usual in tentatively linking the predictions to human emissions.

On the sidelines of the UN climate conference in Durban, the World Meteorological Organization released another report warning of disaster. It alleged that 2011 was on track to be the 10th warmest year since humans began monitoring the Earth’s temperature.

"The science is solid and proves unequivocally that the world is warming," claimed UN WMO deputy boss R.D.J. Lengoasa at the COP17, adding that he thought humanity was a significant contributor. "Climate change is real, and we are already observing its manifestations in weather and climate patterns around the world."

Proponents of human-linked global-warming theories used the report to renew their push for a legally binding climate treaty limiting emissions and providing taxpayer funds to regimes ruling less-developed nations. "Without consensus the whole international system on climate would be placed in peril," explained “climate” negotiator Su Wei of the communist dictatorship ruling mainland China, which has suggested its brutal one-child policy should be lauded for reducing potential future emissions.

The UN climate conference also continued to tout its theories about CO2 emissions being tied to global warming and the various disasters that would ensue without significant global action. But critics pointed to the global body’s own charts and “climate models” to label the Durban scaremongering nothing but “fabricated, robust lies.”

According to the editor of Climate, Cycles, and Change (C3), for example, the UN’s favored models “are significantly wrong by orders of magnitude that smack of total incompetence.” He pointed to the most recent trove of “Climategate” e-mails and several charts showing the utter failure of the UN models to argue that the global body’s “anti-scientific” lies were aimed at pushing global governance.

Still, “climate dignitaries” meeting in Durban from most governments are hoping to sign a treaty to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The agreement, which imposed CO2 emissions limits on the populations of developed nations — excluding the United States, where the Senate refused to ratify the deal — expires in 2012.

"It may seem impossible, but you can get it done," UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) boss Christiana Figueres told governments’ global-warming negotiators. But several key governments — including those from Canada, Japan, Russia, and others — have expressed reluctance to sign a new treaty, especially because poorer nations such as China and India would not be forced to limit their CO2 emissions.

“The wheels have come off the Kyoto Bandwagon, and it’s up to COP-17 in Durban to pretend that the collapse of the Kyoto Protocol and the failure to sign a new global warming treaty will be reversed in the negotiations leading up to COP-18 next year,” explained Director Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment.

But with Kyoto and the revenue it produces about to expire — and prospects for a renewal looking slim — climate bureaucrats are busy devising other ways to raise global-warming money. Options being discussed include global taxes on carbon emissions and government grants.

“The ‘Durban Package’ could change the world if the UN gains the authority to tax and sets in motion economic devastation of Biblical proportions," noted Sovereignty & Security chair for Eagle Forum Cathie Adams, who has tracked UN climate conferences for years as a correspondent. “With the global economy severely distressed, it remains to be seen whether a deal can be struck.”

At the top of the climate agenda for many governments is extracting more money from taxpayers in the developed world. And one of the UN’s key theories in what scientists call a fear-mongering campaign — the alleged threat of rising sea levels — is being fully exploited by rulers from around the world despite being, according to experts, a complete fabrication.

“I accuse you for marketing your country as a nation in immediate danger of becoming flooded and in need of evacuation, despite the incontestable observational fact that this is not the case. You don’t even consider the scientific results obtained in the Maldives,” wrote Nils-Axel Mörner, the former chief of Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics at Stockholm University who served as the leader of the Maldives Sea Level Project. In a letter to Nasheed that was sent to The New American, Mörner lambasted the president for hypocrisy and lies aimed at swindling more money from the world’s taxpayers.

But even as assembled national governments sought to hammer out an agreement that would placate all of them, the Climategate 2.0 scandal largely overshadowed the COP17 talks. In another massive leak of e-mails, the UN’s leading so-called “climate scientists” were exposed conspiring to hide data, break laws, manipulate evidence, and marginalize dissenters.

“They show that major scientists who inform the IPCC can't be trusted to stick to the science and avoid political activism," explained long-time warming-alarmism critic James Delingpole in a piece for the Wall Street Journal this week. “This, in turn, has very worrying implications for the major international policy decisions adopted on the basis of their research.”

Attendance at the Durban climate summit, however, was down about 70 percent from the 2009 COP15 Copenhagen conference. Engineer Tom Nelson called the declining interest in the UN’s increasingly irrelevant climate summits “more evidence of a dying global warming hoax.”

Public alarm over global warming has largely faded as scandals and fact errors continue to make a mockery of UN theories. But according to analysts, “official” concerns will not die easily: The “Parties” involved in the conference all have a vested interest in perpetuating climate hysteria.

On one hand, rich governments seek to impose carbon taxes on their populations while dictators of poor countries seek climate “loot” from wealthier nations’ citizens. Meanwhile, some “climate scientists” seeking more tax-funded grants have put their reputations on the line. And special interests, of course, have invested billions in the theories.

The UN and its legions of bureaucrats are at the same time aiming to consolidate power at the global level, seeking worldwide taxes paid directly to self-styled international authorities. More control over the world economy is another key priority advanced by the climate hysteria. But according to experts, it is only a matter of time before the global-warming “cult,” as critics refer to the movement, completely self destructs.

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